Mozilla releases preview of Firefox for Windows 8

Firefox users everywhere, rejoice! Mozilla has announced that they are making available an early preview version of their browser that was built from the ground up for Windows 8.

The browser is an early alpha build called Aurora and the announcement comes slightly after the company announced that the final build of Firefox for Windows 8 has slipped to early 2014.

This touch-optimized version of the browser is the first alternative to Internet Explorer that’s built from the ground up for the modern interface of Windows 8. It features an attractive tile based Firefox Start experience, the sync capability of the desktop browser, snapped views and full charm integration.

Despite being in alpha, we found the app to be stable and snappy on our test Windows 8.1 machine. It’s got a bunch of great features and is slightly easier to use than the built in modern version of Internet Explorer as well as having support for many emerging HTML5 standards that haven’t been finalized yet.

Right now, Mozilla is working to increase performance and responsiveness of webpages inside the browser so it’s likely few features will change but it’s great that the company is committed to bringing their great browser to the modern interface.

To get started, download the browser from the Mozilla site here. Then, to test the browser make sure that Firefox Aurora is your Windows 8 default browser. Then visit the Windows Start screen to locate the Firefox Aurora tile and launch it from there.

If you find any issues in the browser Mozilla asks that you log it as a bug so that they’re able to fix it in the final release for early 2014.